skyth's Full Review: Battlefield Bad Company for PlayStation 3
Game Review and Features
The construct: Battlefield 1943 is an online First Person Shooter (FPS), a genre that has become extremely popular since the release of the CGA franchise Wolfenstein 2D. Over the years, its appeal has made a jump to hyperspace with the arrival of broadband connections available at homes. Although at first kill-em-all style FPS games were enough to quench homicidal tendencies (all phun intended), people got bored with mindless shooting.
Hence emerged team based online FPS, lead by the extremely successful free Half-Life add-on, Counter-Strike (CS). This team-based add-on became so popular that Sierra bought it and released a full-blown version with a retail price tag. Moreover, its highly awaited sequel is due to be released in first quarter of 2003.
Battlefield 1943 is the next step from CS, in that it extends team based FPS by adding military crafts to the infantry combat: airplanes, tanks, heavy machine guns, ships, carriers, submarines, and defguns are a part of the new arsenal. This, teamed with class-based infantry system is pretty much the next chapter in the FPS genre. Not that crafts weren't tried earlier in FPS, but never this successfully nor with this much regard to the fun factor.
The visuals: Sadly, having to support 32 (64 is the supposed max, but lets be realistic) players in one server, doesn't allow for much processing space for extreme graphics. Unsatisfactory? No. Mind-boggling? No. Decent enough that you won't play with sunglasses? No doubt. The graphics serve their purpose, like the plot in a soft-core porn movie. Nobody is trying to impress you with the story line.
The realism: There isn't much to it. This game is all about fun and strategy, and most of the realism goes out the door with that. The learning curve is very small with all crafts, but to become the best takes a lot of patience and practice. A lot. Flying airplanes is like having a soldier with a rocket engine strapped on his back. A soldier with dual machine guns that never runs out of ammo and that can throw grenades out of his buttoks. Driving tanks is as easy as knowing how to walk and use a turret. Its all very simple to learn and extremely unrealistic, but at the same time incredibly fun. Battlefield 1943 proves that arcade style games still rule the FPS world. If you don't believe me, try playing WWII online for a day and soon you'll ask for a salary.
The game play: This is really the one factor that blows away anything else in the market. There are so many things to master, and they are so easy to get into I cannot tell you enough. Infantry combat is one thing, and once you learn how to fire your machine gun properly (similar to CS, but different nevertheless), you can switch to a different class and it changes your game play strategy. Engineers never survive in offense, but in defense they are a force to be reckoned with. If you want, ask notorious tank commander Piper who lost an entire Panzer army and Hitler's last offensive because of a handful of engineers. The game follows after the real-life counterpart. As an engineer, you can setup mines and explosives and wait in cover. You can keep an entire base clean of enemy with 1 engineer and a couple of infantrymen. The crafts themselves pose another challenge -- tanks pretty much rule most of the game. Yet, someone with superb flying skills (like yours truly) can tip the balance in an area where there aren’t many AA guns. (Flying and bombing properly is the hardest thing to master in this game)
The verdict: This game is immense. The possibilities are amazing, the rules relatively balanced. Yes, tanks rule the war unless exceptional pilots are flying around, but wasn't it the same for most of WWII? For an online FPS, the graphics and realism factor serve better than can be hoped for. The short learning curve and the amazing dept make this game the best FPS available for a long time to come.
Battlefield 1943 Cheats Faq
Cheating is a morbid infestation that plagues most online FPS games. It was one of the reasons I decided to stop playing Counter-Strike online. People taking me out with headshots using a Dessert Eagle, or simply putting on any types of mods that give the other player an inhuman chance over you. Unfortunately, there are many cheats available even with a game as new as Battlefield 1943, and what follows are my analysis on cheats that I have confirmed myself:
Aimbot: This is probably the most notorious cheat available for almost all online FPS games. Aimbot is an outside program that stays in the kernel constantly reading pixel information from the screen, and overwriting mouse input based on where there is a concentration of certain color-schemas, like the black uniform of a German soldier. What aimbot does is to replace human reaction time with machine reflexes, eliminating the delay spent in sending user input through signals. A person using an aimbot is already firing at you seconds before he ever sees you or you see them. Result? Target eliminated before ever been seen.
And yes, there is a Battlefield 1943 aimbot is available on the Internet. But the good news is that it is very, very bad. It only works in infantry combat, and even than it works about 40% of the time. When playing with the aimbot on, player cannot switch to using a vehicle. As most vehicles have an arch with their weapons, tank's shellfire is nullified with the aimbot on. And the moron who built the code didn't give user the option to turn-on and off aimbot easily. You have to exit the game and close the application, and BF1943 is not stable enough to support doing that multiple times.
But during infantry combat, it gives the cheater an unfair advantage especially when sniping.
There is no way to detect someone using this hack.
Distance and wall hacks
This hack gives cheaters the advantage of seeing their targets at impossible distances. A sniper can effectively take someone out all the way across the map, even when the person should be invisible to them. Imagine someone taking out people at trenches in Omaha Beach all the way from the hilltop. That’s what fog hack lets you do. There really isn't anyway to detect this hack either, unless you have a good friend who is spectating.
The wall hack works just like in Counter-Strike, giving people the ability to see through walls. However, in CS you could effectively shoot through walls to kill someone. This doesn't work so well in BF, which makes wall hacking not that useful, but nevertheless an unfair advantage.
Update: Version 1.2 claims to have fixed both Wall and Fog hacks.
Speed Hack There is also a speed hack that I haven't personally confirmed yet. While playing Midway level I noticed that the Japanese destroyer took shots almost twice as fast as I did. I've also watched the same person drive the same vehicle faster than anybody else. One moment they were on the southern flag, and the next I saw them taking over the north flag. This leads me to believe that there is a cheat that changes vehicle data so that ships/tanks fire and move faster than they should. This is an easy hack to detect, but just watching the player move with their vehicles. I will update this data with more information as I research this hack further.
Hacks some people ignore There is also a blood hack, which to me and any other self-respecting player is 100% a cheat. The way you notice that you've hit someone with version 1.2 is that the cross hair changes when a hit successfully connects. This wasn't true with version 1.1 -- so some players went ahead and built a mod that made blood gush out of shot enemy. Moreover, this mod also made enemies flash with bright colors. Some weirdoes think that this is not a hack, as it’s only a mod. That’s pathetic. So I am a sniper lying under the bushes, and you watch me light up like a Christmas tree. That’s not a hack? This unfortunately wasn't fixed with 1.2 release.
I've personally confirmed all the above hacks, except for the speed cheat. Luckily, these hacks aren't as good as the hacks that were readily available for CS. In CS, a player could practically become God, winking in and out of existence and sniping people at point blank range. Nevertheless, as long as there are cheaters, there will be people writing cracks such as the aimbot. So I expect that these cheats will get better as time goes by.
The worst fact about cheating is the realization that there really isn't much you can do about it. Its the developer's job to avoid any hacks from making the game unfair, and as a customer you can't really do anything unless you cheat yourself. Now, the reasons you should not cheat don't necessarily have to be ethical. Who cares about some stupid game anyway? Is it really that bad that you cheat in an online game? You're not stealing or causing anyone pain...right?
So lets skip the ethical reasons not to cheat. The one and simple fact is, cheating takes out all the fun from playing a game. Yes, you will kill the best player of the game who spends maybe 8 hours a day, and you have a real life so you'll never spend that much time becoming that good. So maybe in a sense these insane geeks are cheating too since they practice so much. But really, who in god's name is keeping a score, or giving you a prize? There is no reason to cheat, unless you are trying to make the game unchallenging and stupid for yourself and the rest, which is basically what cheating does. Bottom line is, don't cheat.
I never have, and never will use a cheat program in an online game even for study purposes. I have downloaded and used these cheats, but not on the Internet even though I am one of the most notorious players you will meet. I will steal your plane and your tank if you ever get off to fix it, and I will shoot the vehicle you're running towards just so I can claim it at respawn. But I will never cheat.
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